2,000 Miles, Templars, Cathars and One Missing Alchemist: Our French Campervan Adventure(season 2 finale!)

Speaker A: 00:00:03

Today, for the final episode in this season of the Adventure Story podcast, I'm inviting you to come with us. We're traveling over 2,000 miles and thousands of years of history from Dover to the foot of Mont Blanc.

And on the way, we'll meet the monks who built an abbey on a tidal island that no army ever took. The Templar knights who are said to have vanished into a gorge in the dark.

And just one step ahead from the king of France, an alchemist whose real name no one has ever discovered yet who knew the secrets hidden in a chateau's ceiling in a village. Few people have even heard of the 200 people who chose to walk into a fire rather than say the words that would have set them free.

And a hotelier who couldn't fill his rooms so made up a story to bring the customers in and. And accidentally invented an entire genre of fiction. Thousands of years of history. So many stories.

And we're looking at it all from the door of a camper van. Let's go. Hey, I'm Luke. I'm an author of archaeological adventure novels.

I travel the world looking for stories to put into my books and to share with you right here on the Adventure Story podcast. Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to this season of the podcast. The second, second season I've done.

It has been so special to spend this time with you. I've had so many wonderful conversations with fascinating people on so, so many different, different topics.

And what I what is especially, especially important, what's especially touching is the people who have reached out have said they've enjoyed it, they've suggested guests, they've suggested topics, all these sorts of things. It makes it less me standing on my own talking into a microphone and a conversation between people who are interested in similar things.

As ever, though, podcasts to produce and to create are quite intensive.

So I am looking forward to going off air for a few months to focus on finishing the book, the next book, the book that we are talking about or researching for in this adventure, the Alchemist's Codex. Depending on when you're listening to this, it might already be out.

So if you're not already though, this is your final thought, final invitation from me to join the Adventure Society, which is my weekly newsletter.

It's your ticket to travel with me to share my real world adventures like this one and to find out when a new season of the podcast or a new book is available.

There's a particular kind of quiet that belongs to the early mornings and we felt that the very moment we pulled away from my brother's house in Kent.

We'd stayed there the night before to break the drive up, and when we left, the roads were abandoned, apart from the occasional late night trucker or a taxi or two heading home. And, remarkably, a milk float, which I hadn't realised still existed.

We reached Dover in good time, and at a quarter to eight, the ship's whistle sounded and we were away. That's how it started. Four weeks on the road through France, researching my upcoming book, the Alchemist's Codex.

Eating a great deal of bread and cheese, of course, and drinking a fair amount of wine and beer to boot, and rediscovering a country that I'd somehow lost touch with. I've been to France many times, but most of those visits were as a child. I grew up in Hastings on the south coast of England.

We were close enough there that when you tuned the radio, you'd sometimes find a French station sitting between the English ones and yet separated by 30 miles of water. The two countries are different in all sorts of ways. Now, 30 years on, I'm setting a book there.

case you're Interested, is a: 2008

It was a 40th birthday present to myself. And beyond a few short weekend trips, this was its first real outing. So we were packed, excited and ready to go.

We came off the ferry at Dunkirk, drove on the right, which is to say the wrong side, for the first time, and pulled into a secluded woodland to rest for a couple of hours. It was boiling, so we threw open all the doors and let the wind stream through the van. For me, that feels like the moment this adventure began.

10 Miles or so from the Belgian border, tucked into a patch of forest in northern France, sitting with a coffee, listening to the wind and the birds. It's exactly what I imagined a campervan adventure to be. But of course, it wasn't always going to be like that.

There would be the swelteringly hot nights, the long drives and the mornings that started far earlier than any reasonable person would choose. But that first afternoon set the tone.

Mrs. R and I were heading south and then east, chasing down the locations for the Alchemist's Codex and, and as usually happens, finding a good deal more that we hadn't been looking for. That first night, we'd arranged to see family friends in a small village near Lille, and they treated us like Royalty.

With local drinks pressed into our hands the moment we arrived, and more food than any two people could reasonably eat, it was exactly what we wanted to start the trip off. The next morning, we hit the road and headed for Dieppe.

Now, Dieppe sits in a gap in the chalk cliffs, with white walls rising on either side of the harbour and a mile and a half of pebble beach running along the front.

thing establishment opened in: 1822

Actually, it's almost a mirror image of Hastings or Eastbourne or Brighton, which I know well from England's south coast. But there's one part of the history there that fascinated me more than others, and that is the maps.

For about a generation in the middle of the 16th century, some of the most extraordinary maps in the world were produced here.

pe school flourished from the: 1540

These were vast, gorgeous works of art, really, with sea monsters and wind heads and illustrations of distant people produced by a port town that was at that moment, right in the centre of French exploration.

But this is where Eden and her crew could get involved, because a number of these maps show a large landmass on the southern coast east of Java, labelled as Java Legrande researchers have argued for decades about what this represents.

And could it be the coast of Australia, mapped by Portuguese navigators and then passed to the mapmakers of Dieppe more than two centuries before Cook ever went there? Of course, we'll never know for certain, but it makes a great story.

The next morning, we drove west along the alabaster coast to Fay camp and straight into the first setback of the trip. Because the campsite was full. A note on this. We had decided not to book any campsites in advance, so that we could move whenever we felt like it.

Of course, that comes with risks, but I always think they're worth it. We drove 10 minutes further down the coast to the village of Eport, found a site there instead, and that turned out to be great.

We positioned ourselves up on the cliffs with a fine view of the sea and the town beneath us, and just sort of settled in for a couple of days. Eport sits in a narrow gap in the vast white walls of chalk. Those Cliffs are, in a rather alarming way, still very much a work in progress.

They erode constantly, and landslides here are common enough that every path carries a warning about it, so every collapse brings down more of what's inside. They're dramatic and, I think, slightly sinister, given they would crush anything standing beneath them without even realizing it.

Their beauty is added to by the waterfalls that just seem to spout down onto the beach, looking like they were designed purely to be photographed. The mood changes, though, when you see what's on the headland above the town.

The concrete shells of Hitler's Atlantic Wall fortifications still there, dotting the cliff top.

These aren't, of course, the first fortifications on that coast, because it's been an important strategic place for thousands of years, and successive generations have left their own ones behind. But these are simply the most recent. This part of France was occupied by German forces from.

From: 1940

They're blank, brutally functional.

And standing inside in the cold, in the damp, in the dark, the concrete streaked with water and graffiti, now you can look out and see this sort of rectangle of the bright sea still visible there through the opening. And it's a bit haunting. It's impossible not to think of the men who sat there in a.

In a different time, you know, 80 years ago, thinking about watching the same view and waiting for something to happen, for something to come that way.

It's a sharp reminder that even though this stretch of coast is idyllic now, with fossil beaches and waterfalls and all of that, it's not always been that way. And that, I suppose, is true of a lot of the beautiful places we go to. It's just here, though, someone left that evidence lying around.

As you'll imagine, I love to read about the places that I'm visiting. And this one, this little story I uncovered, is quite incredible. The Abbey of the Holy Trinity in Fay Camp is massive.

It's about the size of Notre Dame de Paris. And that's surprising because FAMP itself is quite a small town. It's not a city by any stretch of the imagination.

But this abbey is big for one reason, because of the relic it was built to house. The legend goes that after Christ's crucifixion, drops of his blood were gathered and sealed into two small lead vials.

These vials were then hidden inside the Hollow trunk of a fig tree. And that trunk was cast into the sea.

It drifted, amazingly, from the Holy Land across the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic before being washed ashore. You guessed it right here at Fay Camp. What are the chances of that?

told in this way from around: 1120

On the beach, I assume, with as you'd expect. Well, or not, those two vials hidden inside.

Now, this led FAMP to become one of the great pilgrimage sites of the last few centuries, and that abbey becoming one of the richest in Normandy. But that is not where the story ends. Oh, no.

In June: 2022

Then a few weeks later, a Dutch art detective named Arthur Brand, known in the press as the Indiana Jones of the art world. That tells you it all, doesn't it? Opened the door on his Amsterdam apartment and found a cardboard box sitting on his doorstep.

Inside was the relinquiry.

The thieves, it seems, had got cold feet and in an anonymous email to Brand, told him they were handing the relics back because they feared the blood of Christ came with a curse. After a few days on the road, it was time to do some miles and start our journey south. And what a place we were heading for.

A thousand year old abbey standing on a tidal island just off the coast, its spire so unique and picturesque, clawing at the sky, you'd recognize it immediately. If that sounds like the opening of one of my novels, the setting of one of my novels as well, you'd absolutely be right.

Because Getting to Mont St. Michel feels a bit like stepping into another world before you've even arrived. You walk several hundred feet across a bridge spanning the tidal waters of the bay.

And this bay has some of the highest tidal ranges in Europe, with stretches of quicksand that have swallowed the unwary for centuries. The island doesn't invite you in easily, although now the bridge and the shuttle buses make it much less dangerous.

But I suppose that's the march of capitalism. Then you pass through the battlements.

These walls held off English forces for 30 years during the Hundred Years War, earning Mont St. Michel the only fortification in northern France ever to fall. And then you're through in the narrow cobbled streets that feel entirely unchanged since the Middle Ages.

The noise of the modern world drops away, and the abbey pulls your gaze to the sky. For a thriller writer, the place is almost unfair.

You have an island completely cut off at high tide, a maze of medieval streets, secret passages, fortified levels climbing toward the church, the thousands of years of monks and kings and soldiers all having moved through the place. And above it all, that theatrical drama of the tide emptying and filling the bay twice a day, the island emerging and dissolving back into the sea.

Trouble is, though, that Mont St. Michel doesn't really lend itself to alchemy. So forcing it into the alchemist's codex, I feel, would have been a stretch.

Of course, I could invent something to make it fit, but isn't really how I like to work in my books. The settings are characters in their own right, and in a way, they dictate to me what the story ought to be about.

So on this occasion, I'm leaving it. I think that's the right thing to do. But what I'm certain of is that this extraordinary place will end up in one of my stories eventually.

But exactly how, I don't know. We'll have to just wait and see. We moved on again after that, pushing south to a gem that very much does feature in the pages of the alchemist codex.

Hidden amongst the fields and forests of southwest France, Dampierre sur Bouton is a small collection of limestone buildings nestled between the strands of the Bouton River. It's a postcard of a village, a beautiful little place that we could very easily have just sit back in, sipping local wine and swimming in the river.

But we weren't there to laze around. We were there on a mission to discover the secrets of the local chateau, or at least to try.

Built on the foundations of a Templar house in the Renaissance style, with towers and turrets, it's a building that commands attention. But it isn't the building itself that's interesting that we were there to go and see. It's one of the ceilings.

stone ceiling carved between: 1545

And behind each one of them, I'm now convinced, lies a meaning that only certain people were ever meant to understand. They're too perfect. There's too much time and effort gone into that ceiling for it not to mean anything to deepen the mystery.

Nobody really knows who designed the ceiling.

It was almost certainly commissioned by the Clermont Vivian family, who owned the chateau in the 16th century and ended up in the highest circles of the French Renaissance court. But why they chose these symbols and what it all means when you put it together in that way, it's never really been settled.

rs, which he published in the: 1930

He described it in detail.

He spent over 200 pages interpreting each one of these carved squares one by one and pulling out all of the different meanings there, the different bits of philosophy, the four elements, the great work, transformation, all of these little things.

Nobody knows, though, who Falconelli was, or indeed is, but his reading of Dampierre drew that kind of particular type of pilgrim that to that tiny village in rural France, including scholars and seekers and researchers, and now us. And in the pages of the Alchemist Codex, it's going to draw Eden Black and her crew, too.

After two days in Dampierre, we hit the road again for our longest journey yet. As we drove, I was painfully aware of how much we were missing. Whole regions, whole regions that we didn't have time to stop at.

The this trip also demonstrated to me just how vast France is. We were out for four weeks, and still I feel like we only just scratched the surface at that point.

We'd been on the road almost a week and had only covered a few stops on the northern coast. I think it's going to take several more trips to do it justice.

Now, though, we were headed south, far enough that the road signs started listing cities in Spain. And we were going there, but for one very important reason.

When I was looking for somewhere to continue the action of the Alchemist Codex, I read about this great fist of rock that rose a thousand feet from the valley floor with a castle balanced on the top. Then I read about the Albigensian Crusade and the siege that took place there.

And with that, I decided that Monsegur had to be in this book, the short version of the history. And I'll keep this very short.

This goes like in: 1209

warfare followed, and by the: 1240

On the summit were a few hundred defenders and beneath them, several thousand men. The siege lasted nine months and ended only when the attackers found a way up the eastern ridge in the dark and took an outlying tower.

In March: 1244

More than 200 people chose the fire instead in a field at the foot of the mountain, still known today as the Field of the Burned. But there's more, and this is the part that really interests me.

Legend has it that in the nights before the surrender, four men climbed down the cliff face carrying the treasure of the Cathar church. No one has ever established what exactly that treasure is.

to Rahn, who came here in the: 1930

When he couldn't produce what he'd promised to some very bad men indeed, things didn't go well for him. I came down off that mountain with a head full of scenes that I just can't wait to put into words when I get back to the keyboard.

Our next journey was a short one, barely an hour along winding roads to the hilltop village of Rennes le Chateau.

It's a small place with a couple of hundred people at most, a church, a few narrow streets and a view out across the valley that seems to go on forever. You could drive past the turning and never think about it, but. But this village has something very interesting hidden inside it.

tell you. The story starts in: 1885

to nothing. Then, from around: 1891

He spent loads. He restored the church, he built a villa, an ornamental tower and laid out gardens and an orangery.

The total spend has been estimated to be over a million pounds in today's terms, and all of it by a country priest who was basically paid pittance. And the church. When you look at it really is intriguing.

It's dedicated to Mary Magdalene inside, but crouching there under the holy water bowl, is a painted statue of a demon. The whole place is full of other interesting details that have led people for over a century to argue.

then inspired by this, in the: 1950

Of course, skeptics say that particular hotel owner made the whole thing up to generate business. And maybe that's true, and maybe that's not true, but of course, we'll never find out.

But the important and exciting thing here is the story continues to this day, some people suggesting that that priest suddenly falling on good times, finally, at Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, which of course sold like millions and millions and millions of copies. The real winners, though, are the people who live in the village, who now receive hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

And to be fair, it didn't stop us climbing up there to have a look around on one very hot afternoon. And while there, though, we saw something we hadn't expected at all. Let me go back a year. Twelve months ago, we visited Mrs. R's homeland, Zimbabwe.

It was a great trip, very different to this one, but inspiring in its own way.

Scattered around Rennes Le Chateau, though, we saw these statues that looked remarkably like the ones we had seen on the streets and in the markets of Zimbabwe. Once again, we looked into it and we found that the link was a Swiss sculptor named Urs Zimmermann.

mmerman was born in Zurich in: 1955

And then he went to Zimbabwe, and he spent time at Tengenigi in the north of the country, learning to carve serpentine from the sculptures working there. That's a type of stone, and the commune's own account describes it as one of the defining periods of his life. Tanganyi is a village.

e. The village started in the: 1960

When international sanctions following Rhodesia's declaration of independence wrecked the tobacco market. Though Bloomfield discovered his land was sitting on deep deposits of serpentine. This rock richly covered stone that carved beautifully.

And he turned his workforce to sculpture instead. What came out of this was one of the most significant art movements of the 20th century.

The approach at its core is that the sculptor doesn't impose a design on the stone. They work without sketches and carve sort of finding what's already in the stone. And Zimmerman carried that back with him.

ttled at Rennes le Chateau in: 1990

I absolutely love that idea.

I think it sort of goes back to what I was saying about Mont St. Michel and sensing the story and the place, you know, letting the two sort of emerge organically as opposed to forcing one on the other.

And so there we were in this village which draws all of those visitors a year, hunting for treasure that might be real, might not be surrounded by this genuine work made by a man who learned his craft in a small village just a couple of hours where. Where we had been exactly a year to the day.

It felt to me like there was some kind of coming together of circles there, completing some loops that I really love when I travel.

And that continued in our next stop as well, because this was an absolute gem and one we didn't see coming, because it tied together, as I say, two of the locations I've already used in the alchemist's codex. But in a way I couldn't have predicted. This place is Carcassonne.

If you haven't been there or haven't heard anything about it, it's one that you just need to look up. It's an old walled city sitting above the river, ringed by roughly two miles of ramparts, with 52 fairy tale towers.

Its history is a complex one, too, spanning 2,000 years from the Romans right up to about 200 years ago. And it featured in the Albigensian Crusade II, the same war that ended down the road in Montsegor.

Carcassonne was sheltering the Cathars when the Crusader army arrived to cut off the city's water supply. The place held out for about two weeks before thirst did what the siege engines couldn't.

The young viscount, who was only 24, went out to try and negotiate, but it didn't go well for him, and he died in a dungeon beneath his own castle later that year. Simon de Montfort took the city and eventually passed it on to the French crown.

hat we've seen today. Then in: 1659

became a stone quarry. By the: 1840

But in a twist of fate, the whole ancient town was saved by a local antiquarian named Jean Pierre Crossmerville. That's a good accent there, isn't it? He campaigned relentlessly until he won the backing of Prosper Merimee, inspector of the historical monuments.

And in: 1835

So the spire that burned in: 2019

So the man who gave Paris its most famous silhouette also gave Carcassonne those pointed slate roofs on the towers with also saved it from demolition.

And talking of those slate roofs, they're the most argued about feature of the place because they're not actually the originals, they're a northern French idea of design.

And almost certainly the original roof would have had flatter terracotta tiles, which means what everyone photographs today is really a 19th century idea of what the castle would have looked in the Middle Ages, but with the alchemist codex bringing them all together already, spanning from Notre Dame to Montsegor. And for me again, it felt like a stop that was meant to happen.

From there, we spent a few days in the Ardeche with family, and on our way out, we drove the length of the road that winds its way along the top of the gorge.

It passes views of rivers, it snakes through forests, through tunnels and beneath cliffs, and offers great views of the majestic Pont d', Arc, a natural arch of rock that spans the river. Around halfway along, we saw a sign for a viewpoint called Belvedere des Templars, the viewpoint of the Templars. And of course we had to stop.

The view alone justified it.

Below, the Ardeche swung around an enormous horseshoe bend, the Cirque du Madeleine, with the cliffs dropping more than 200 meters to a river the colour of green glass. But there was nothing down there that I could see that linked the place to our favourite medieval brotherhood.

So I couldn't work out where the name had come from, of course.

I did some research and it turns out that amid the trees there, at the centre of that bend, so overgrown now to be virtually invisible, there are ruins. Locally, they've been known for generations as the Belladerie des Templars, or the Templars Leper house. And the story attached to them is a good one.

had the templars arrested in: 1307

The deeper I dug, though, the more that story started to come apart.

Excavations between: 2013

And as things stand, there isn't a single document or object linking the place to the Templars. The knights, it seems, were added by 19th century scholars who liked the sound of them. More smoke and mirrors than actual truth there then.

But somebody built there and rebuilt and buried their dead there for 600 years in one of the most inaccessible spots in the gorge. And we still don't really know who or why.

What I love about this, though, more importantly than the frustration of not getting a clear answer, is that that single road sign sent me tumbling down a research rabbit hole I'd never have found otherwise. I think this is true of travel.

When you go somewhere new, you've no idea what's waiting, what's going to be around that corner and what you're going to find. Much the same, I think, as opening a new book. The adventure is always there. You've just got to. You've just got to uncover it right.

You've just got to go seeking for it.

After a hard day's drive and a hard day's hunting the Templars in the Ardeche, we arrived on the shore of Lake Annecy, barely half an hour from Geneva. This was a beautiful stop.

The lake is about 15 kilometers long, lying roughly north to south, and sits in this valley, gouged out by a glacier in what looks like a really violent way at the end of the last ice age. But what the glacier left behind is this body of water hemmed by these giant teeth of rock that stick up above the tree line into the sky.

It's nothing short of theatrical from the shoreline. And the water really is an amazing thing too.

It's deep, saturated blue green, the sort you only get in photographs that people have messed around with. And it goes down a long way to over 80 meters at the deepest point.

Standing on that shore in the shallows, you can see individual stones meters out and meters down, in focus, as though there's no water there at all. It really is a wonderful place.

One afternoon we walked into the old town, which people call the Venice of the Alps, and it's a nickname that's well earned. The whole place is threaded with narrow canals, all of them fed by that lake. Pastel houses lean over the water, the bridges bloom with flowers.

And sitting in the middle of it, on the wedge of an island at the prow of the ship, is the Palais d'. Islay. It's a fantastic place that we definitely enjoyed having a little look around.

And after a couple of days there, we turned east and started to climb. Eventually we were parked at the foot of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Western Europe.

And looking up from our tiny little van, I could see thousands of feet up this frozen expanse of snow and ice that just seemed to hang there, ready, prepared, primed to slip at any moment. Then again, I'm a thriller writer, so I sort of feel. I feel as though I see threat in everything, and that's sort of part of the job.

imbed it, they came back with: 4805

ing down from a record set in: 2007

And my fear of it sliding down on top of us, that turns out to be far less far fetched, too.

In: 1892

Since then, it's been monitored by radar and borehole sensors and drained repeatedly to stop the same thing happening again. Not to be put off by such dicing with death, though we did all sorts of fun things while we were there.

nk when the railway opened in: 1908

The ice came up almost to the station.

Now you need to get a cable car down from the station and then 580 steps, and they add more steps every year as the glacier gets further and further and further away. In the last 25 years alone, it has retreated over 800 meters.

For me, that's genuinely shocking to see that sort of climate change right in front of you there like that. And I wonder if in another hundred years it will be gone altogether.

It's also extraordinary to think what the ice might be holding into, given that some of it is hundreds of years old, or even more.

In my book the Titanic Deception, I open with this when two climbers find a well preserved body inside a glacier near the Matterhorn, which is really close by to Mont Blanc. So it's a thought I've had before. And I wasn't the only Reich to be inspired by this place.

Mary Shelley came here in: 1816

This gives you astonishing views up to the summit, down into the glaciers and across to the peaks of Italy. Now, I don't really like heights, I wouldn't say I'm afraid exactly, but I just don't go seeking them out.

But this was worth every second standing there, looking out at this uninterrupted, sublime beauty of the mountainside, the rock and the ice and the. It was awe inspiring. It really, really was.

I don't have a story yet in mind for this, but you never know because these things do have a habit of coming back when you least expect them. Heading north, we decided to take the route through Switzerland. I'd heard the landscape was beautiful and I'd never been to that country before.

So they were two decent reasons to go already. We stopped for two nights on the shore of Lake Neuchatel, in the centre of the country.

We needed a couple of days at a slower tempo, and this was perfect for it, with a long, calm sheet of water and the vineyards running down to the shore. What I didn't know until I looked at the map properly is that we'd happened to stop at one of the most significant archaeological sites in Europe.

Just keeps delivering, doesn't it? On the northeastern tip of the lake, where the water shallows out and the River Thiel runs towards the Lake Biel, there's a bay called Latenae.

we stayed. Then, in November: 1857

A fisherman hunting antiquities for a local collector spotted some timbers standing proud of the shallows. He stopped to look and within an hour had pulled out 40 objects, including swords and spearheads.

What made everyone sit up was the metal, because every other lake site was producing bronze, but these were iron. Excavations went on for decades and brought up thousands more.

Many of the weapons had never been sharpened, and many have been deliberately bent or broken before going into the water, which is what people do to an object they're giving up to God rather than losing it.

Whether this was a settlement, an armoury or a sacrificial site has been argued about ever since, but the finds were distinctive enough to define an entire period.

The Latenae culture, the label now used for Celtic Europe from Ireland to Anatolia, and is named after a shallow corner of that Swiss lake where a fisherman stopped to look. And we took a few days just to chill out.

Nearing the end of a busy trip around France, we walked to the archaeological museum nearby and found it closed. So that's another reason to come back at another time. Then a night in Strasbourg broke our journey home.

A few hours was just enough to make me realise it's a place and a region I badly want to come back to. We walked into the old town in the evening and looked up at the cathedral, which is an experience I'd recommend to anyone.

It's built from pink sandstone, so at the end of the day, the whole west front glows that pink color of raw salmon. And it's covered every surface, every niche with the stonework that's so fine and so detailed.

It looks to be, you know, it looks to be almost mechanical, the detail on it. It's quite incredible. It's also lopsided.

Construction began in the 12th century, but they ran out of money by the time they'd finished, so only the North Tower was ever finished. The result is a vast symmetrical facade with only a single spire suiting off to one side, just over 140 metres up.

One last thing struck me as we were on our way out of Strasbourg is that it sits on the Rhine.

And between the 17th century and the 20th, it's changed hands multiple times, from the French to the German to the French again to the German again to the French again. Families here have lived under both flags without ever leaving the house.

And it's precisely because of that history that the city was chosen after the war as the seat of the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Parliament, the most fought over city on the continent. I suppose that means taking care of the job to make sure that doesn't happen again.

Now, looking back at the whole adventure, what strikes me is how little of France we actually saw.

We roamed from the flatlands of the north down to the Pyrenees, across the Alps, along beaches, through gorges covering four weeks and over 2,000 miles. And I came away with a strong sense of having barely scratched it. There's a whole Atlantic coast we didn't touch.

There's Brittany, there's Provence and Burgundy and the Dordogne and about 40 other places. People have since told me we absolutely must go. Which is, I suppose, the best possible outcome. Right?

You want to finish a trip with a longer list than you started with. I went to France with a list of locations for the Alchemist's Codex, and I found most of them.

The impossible ceiling at Dampierre, the mountain at Monsiegor and Carcassonne, closing a loop that I hadn't even thought about. But some other moments have stayed with me too. The road sign in the Ardeche that sent me down, that research rabbit hole.

The tidal island in Normandy that I now have to save for a book that I'll be writing in the future. And a glacier retreating faster than anyone can build, steps down to it.

That's the thing about traveling like this, I think, in the van with the doors open, stopping when you feel like it. The road shows you where to go. The doors open, things get in and you just go along for the journey.

And now, as I'm reminded, frequently got a book to finish. And that is top of the list the moment we get home. This is the Adventure Story podcast. Thank you so much for hanging out with me this season.

It really has been a pleasure to bring you this now 20 something episodes I think. And it was 20 last season.

So yeah, I've enjoyed exploring some topics, meeting some people, talking some things through and going behind the scenes on some of my books as well. Today's episode was a little bit of a different one. I didn't know how sort of following a trip like that would go down. So please do let me know.

I'm always interested in your comments. Normally I focus on a theme rather than a place, don't I? So we'd look at like for example monsegour there or the Cathars or something like that.

But here we talked about Templars, we about talked, talked about Cathars, we've talked about the second World War, we've talked about loads of themes but all linked by the journey that we went on. So I wonder how that resonated with you and if you, if you enjoyed that, if you found that useful.

I imagine if you're planning a trip or you've done a trip, maybe it will be. Thank you so much. As I say, I hope to be back with a third season. I plan to be back with the third season.

I've got some episodes in mind already but as I say now I've got a book to finish and that's how takes time and that takes focus. In the meantime, if there's any episodes you missed, do go back and have a look. I'd love, love, love for you to enjoy the entire the entire series.

Do check out my website for more blog posts and stuff about the books.

That's lukerichardsonauthor.com link in the show notes as always and the most important thing, if you need more adventure in your life, I invite you to join the Adventure so Society. That's my weekly newsletter and I'd love, love, love for you to be there.

You can travel with me, share my real world adventures and find out when a new story or a new season of this podcast drops again. Lukerichardsonauthor.com is where you have to go there. Bon voyage, enjoy the adventure and I'll see you next time.